By Robert Moran

Somehow, in the bizarre world of electronic dance music, those sweaty nightclubs and drug-filled festival tents across Europe and the US, there’s a strain of Australian superstars raking in headline slots and mega-bucks, relatively unknown at home compared to their international pull.

Names like Nervo, the Melbourne twins who were once named by Forbes as “the highest-paid female act in EDM”, and Timmy Trumpet, who sounds like a kids’ cartoon but is actually ranked ninth on DJ Mag’s annual Top 100 DJs list (a sort of international ladder for mainstream EDM popularity and, hence, booking fees). Alison Wonderland is another of those high-profile stars.

The DJ, real name Alexandra Sholler, built a local reputation with club and festival slots in Australia before moving to Los Angeles around 2014, after she “followed some idiot” she was dating there. In 2015, her debut album Run went to no.1 on Billboard’s Dance/Electronic Albums chart, a feat she repeated with 2018’s Awake. In 2018, she also became the highest-billed female DJ to perform at Coachella, and even now she ranks among DJ Mag’s top 50, ahead of known pop fixtures like Deadmau5 and Zedd.

Alison Wonderland worked through personal trauma on her album, Loner.Credit:Universal Music Group

The life of such an in-demand EDM star is, of course, nomadic. A club spot in China one day, Korea the next, then right back to the States. But like a memory wipe, the pandemic upended Sholler’s schedule, no gigs for almost a year-and-a-half.

“I’m a very heavy touring artist, and for it to completely stop after, you know, 10 years or more? It was a lot,” Sholler recalls from her home in Los Angeles. “I’d only ever known my entire adult life as living out of suitcases and having a small place that would be, like, a suitcase graveyard with a bed, you know?

“But I realised that living like that isn’t actually good for anyone. It was exhausting. It’s late nights, early mornings, on an aeroplane every single day, not eating real food. It’s not sustainable. I think for my own physical and mental health, I shouldn’t be doing that, especially at a time when I was healing and dealing with a lot.”

The enforced break lead to her newest album Loner, which in May debuted at no.9 on the ARIA albums chart, no.3 on US Billboard’s Top Dance/Electronic Albums, earned more than 65 million global streams, and received glowing reviews from the likes of LA Weekly who called it Sholler’s “opus”. Early single Fear of Dying, with its Lana Del Rey-lite lilt, shows a keen songwriter bent, far removed from EDM’s build-ups and drops, while new single Down the Line, recorded in the same sessions, pairs stuttering beats with chiming indie guitars and singalong choirs.

Sholler, who’s previously spoken about her mental health battles, says Loner came out of the most traumatic moment of her life, one she isn’t yet ready to publicly address. “I just want to work through it first,” she explains. “I’m still processing what happened and it’s quite a traumatic thing, and I’ve gone back and forth on whether I’m ready to talk about it yet, and I’m just not ready to even go there. But it was horrible, and it was extreme enough for me to call it ‘rock bottom’ and try to make some changes.”

Even without specificity, trauma imbues the album. Opener Forever evokes those moments when self-help cliches suddenly take on meaning: “It will feel like forever until it doesn’t,” sings Sholler. She says she pulled herself out of the heaviness by writing about it.

“It was interesting because I never listen to my albums, but I went back and I listened to, like, my story, and I was like, ‘Yo, in every other album, I am the victim! I don’t want to be the victim anymore,’” Sholler says. “This whole album was about me taking my power back, regardless of how bad the situation was, and it was really bad. I looked in the mirror and it was embarrassing and I felt stupid. I had to make a lot of changes and it was frustrating and it took a long time for me, but I did it.”

“I looked in the mirror and it was embarrassing and I felt stupid,” the EDM star says.Credit:Universal Music Group

It sounds like a triggering listen, but Sholler says Loner is “by far the most hopeful music I’ve ever written”.

“I wanted to show people that, whatever it is, you can get out of it. ‘It will feel like forever until it doesn’t’, that is the opening quote from my album, but that’s a real thing. I was crying in a Starbucks drive-thru, in limbo, at rock bottom. I cried to my friend, ‘It feels like the universe is giving me stuff, like, Here. Just kidding. Here. Just kidding. Here. Just f—ing kidding!’ And my friend looked at me and said, ‘It’ll feel like forever until it doesn’t.’ And I swear to God, it became my mantra.

“I don’t want anyone feeling sorry for me, this is not a pity thing. I’m glad, in hindsight, that I had that wake-up call to get up and make some changes in my life, and I’m better off now because of it. Like, I know it worked.”

Sholler, 36, was born to Croatian immigrants in Sydney’s eastern suburbs in 1986. “Yep, wog for life,” she deadpans. She took up cello at 11, “locked myself in a music room my entire schooling”, studied at The Conservatorium and then at university in Bremen in Germany. She got switched onto making electronic music after discovering the Swedish group The Knife. “It was just, like, a whole different level of freedom as an artist,” she says.

She still plays cello and incorporates it into her live show and songwriting, but doesn’t practice much anymore. “Honestly, when I’m playing my cello now, it’s not like a Bach suite. It’s very much a part of me musically, but it’s not as technically advanced. It’s just so I can get up with flashing lights in my face and still play something.”

She had a sliding doors moment while performing at Coachella in 2018, wondering what could’ve happened if she’d stuck with the cello instead of turning to EDM. “I was watching Hans Zimmer play, and there was a cellist playing a solo. It was like, wow, maybe if I stayed playing cello, I may have still played Coachella! What if, like, that’s where I ended up?”

Transforming Loner into a live spectacle has been her recent focus, and she played her fifth sold-out headline show at Colorado’s famed Red Rocks Amphitheatre earlier this month. The visuals for Forever, featuring a light show like a stained-glass cathedral, were formed while microdosing psychedelics, she explains. A fan in a parking lot after one of her shows, an amateur alchemist looking “to push his brand”, asked her if she did mushrooms.

“I said yes, and he handed me some chocolates shaped like gummy bears. He said, ‘I made these, each one is a microdose, and I want you to try it.’ I was like, cool, you know? So I went to my room and did a gummy bear and I was fine, didn’t feel anything. Two days later, I thought, I’m gonna try microdosing during the day and see what goes on, and I ate another bear.”

She laughs at her recklessness. “So, like, the sizes and portions of these things are not always regulated, right? I’m trusting the random guy in the parking lot, which is, like, so stupid. My grandma’s gonna read this, oh gosh.”

She started tripping in the middle of a phone call with one of her crew members. “We’re just catching up on life, it’s been an hour, and I started cooking a hot dog, right? The spatula starts moving like rubber and then everything starts, like, breathing at me, and I’m like, ‘Oh god, I’ve gotta get off the phone.’ I turn the stove off and, I’m like, holy shit, there was a lot in that dose, what am I gonna do?”

Perhaps counterintuitively to us straight-thinkers, she slipped on her Oculus Rift, Meta’s now discontinued range of virtual reality goggles. She set its channel to a New Zealand beach, and sat there “tripping balls”, while old VR couples wandered by. Looking for a still mellower mood, she switched the channel and landed inside a church.

“I don’t do any other drugs. I’ve never tried molly, I’ve never done ecstasy. I don’t do anything. I don’t even smoke weed.”

“All of a sudden, I saw the visuals for Forever,” she recalls. “I have my Oculus on and I go, ‘Siri, call Garth’ [her manager], and I’m like, ‘Garth, write this down because I’m tripping balls right now.’ Anyway, I swear to God, exactly what was in my head is now at my show, and it’s so crazy when something materialises exactly as you imagine in your head. I turned around at Red Rocks and I was like, holy f—, I saw that entire thing in my head and now it’s real. Incredible. Now, moral of the story, I haven’t microdosed again since then.”

Despite the story, and wider stereotypes around the dance music world, drugs are not a creative, or recreational, focus, says Sholler.

“I don’t do any other drugs. I actually don’t. I’ve never tried molly, I’ve never done ecstasy. I don’t do anything. I don’t even smoke weed. The only thing I sometimes do is a small amount of shrooms. I just like tripping, it’s fun!

“Plus, I truly believe that psychedelics do help with mental health. There have been studies and I back it. But I would say if I’m tripping, I’m usually prepared for it. And I always come out feeling cleansed and good.”

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